Shevardnadze Quits to Protest ‘the Advance of Dictatorship’ : Soviet Union: Foreign minister’s resignation is a stunning blow to Gorbachev. Moscow reassures world that ‘new thinking’ will continue.

Incensed by right-wing critics and his nation’s accelerating course toward “dictatorship,” Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze abruptly resigned Thursday, dealing a spectacular and brutal blow to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s efforts to salvage a domestic political consensus.

His raspy voice quavering in anger, the normally debonair Georgian, who has been the No. 1 Soviet diplomat virtually throughout Gorbachev’s tenure as Soviet leader, said he is sacrificing his job to alert his compatriots to the gathering forces of reaction.

“I want to make this statement: I am resigning,” Shevardnadze, 62, declared to the Congress of People’s Deputies, which listened in rapt silence. “Don’t react and don’t swear at me. Let this be my contribution, my protest against the advance of dictatorship.”

In the context of the deepening crisis in Soviet politics and the economy, it was hard to conceive of a single event more damaging to Gorbachev than the unexpected and sensational loss of an ally with such immense worldwide prestige and respect at home.

The Parliament members, and Gorbachev in particular, were visibly stunned. Half the 1,700 Congress members in attendance at the Kremlin rose to give Shevardnadze an ovation after his often-furious 10-minute address, but Gorbachev remained seated at the dais, saying nothing.

Later, however, he rejected any hint that he might be the tyrant Shevardnadze had in mind.

“We’re not talking about any dictatorship but rather strong central powers, and they shouldn’t be confused,” Gorbachev said, referring to the proposed reorganization of executive power. “As president, I have no information about someone somewhere preparing a junta.”

The Foreign Ministry spokesman, Vitaly I. Churkin, stressed at a news briefing that Shevardnadze’s decision, which “cost him many sleepless nights,” is irreversible.

“The minister hopes that this step, taken by a man in his position and of his authority, will become a serious warning to all, will make people take a sober and calm look at themselves,” Churkin said. “Unless people rise up to defend democratic gains, Shevardnadze believes, a dictatorship is very near.”

However, government officials said that Shevardnadze--who replaced Andrei A. Gromyko, the glum-faced “Mr. Nyet,” as Soviet foreign minister in July, 1985--has agreed to remain in his post for an unspecified length of time.

Gorbachev also made it clear that he would endeavor to keep his longtime friend and fellow reformer--they first met as Communist Youth League officials in the late 1950s--in the national leadership.

“For those of my colleagues who from the first days, from before 1985, were involved and made their choice, so to speak, this may be the most difficult time,” Gorbachev, speaking slowly and gravely, told the Congress after Shevardnadze had spoken. “To leave now is unforgivable; it must be condemned. And the demand must be made: Continue this fight.”

In an unintentional tribute to how intimately Shevardnadze is linked to achievements in Kremlin foreign policy--including the stunning improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations and the peaceful reunification of Germany--journalists covering the Congress were hastily assembled and reassured that Soviet “new thinking” in world affairs will continue.

“I am meeting with you in the sole aim of heading off an undesirable reaction abroad,” Gorbachev’s personal spokesman, Vitaly N. Ignatenko, told the correspondents. “I would like your listeners and readers to know that our foreign policy can’t be changed in a minute.”

But Tass, the official news agency, said that Shevardnadze’s “bolt from the blue” was a heavy blow to Gorbachev’s attempts to avoid a break with the “truly democratic wing in the Soviet leadership.”

Allies of Shevardnadze said he had become another victim of the resurgent right, like Interior Minister Vadim V. Bakatin, a progressive recently fired by Gorbachev and replaced by a general of the KGB security police who espouses a harder line on law and order.

“I view this as an offensive of the reactionary forces,” commented Alexander N. Yakovlev, a longstanding Gorbachev ally who has become a virtual non-person in Soviet politics because hard-liners find him too radical.

Vitaly A. Korotich, editor of the progressive magazine Ogonyok, said Shevardnadze, like Bakatin before him, had simply been sacrificed: “Gorbachev is now paying for staying in office with the very people who put him there.”

Conservatives and Communist Party stalwarts have singled out Shevardnadze for special opprobrium for his role in permitting the peaceful overthrow of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe--an epoch-making event that has left the Soviet Union virtually without allies--and for aligning Soviet foreign policy with that of the Bush Administration in the Persian Gulf.

On Wednesday, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan demanded that lawmakers pass a law to bar Gorbachev from creating “a second Afghanistan” by sending Soviet troops to enforce U.N. sanctions against Iraq.

That statement, an irritated Shevardnadze told the Congress, “exhausted my patience,” since, he said, he has repeatedly given assurances that the Kremlin has no plans to send “even a single serviceman” to the Persian Gulf.

With special vehemence, Shevardnadze laced into the “boys with colonel’s epaulets”--a reference to Col. Viktor I. Alksnis and Col. Nikolai S. Petrushenko, leaders of the Parliament’s right-wing Soyuz (Union) faction who have demanded that he be brought to account at the Congress for his conduct of Soviet foreign policy.

“Who stands behind these comrades, and what is all this?” Shevardnadze asked. Although pledging continued loyalty to Gorbachev--”I am his friend, we are like-minded”--Shevardnadze all but openly accused Gorbachev of now allowing hard-liners and orthodox Marxist-Leninists like the Soyuz group far too much sway.

“Let me say openly, comrade democrats--and I use this word in the broadest sense here--you have fled. All reformers have taken to the hills,” Shevardnadze said. “A dictatorship is advancing. I am saying this with full responsibility. No one knows what kind of dictatorship it will be, who will personify it, what kind of dictator he will be and what kind of regime it will become.

“Until the end of my days,” Shevardnadze said, he will support Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms and greater democratization of Soviet life. But, he said, “I cannot put up with the events which are happening in my country, and with the tribulations that lie in store for my people. I still believe, I believe that dictatorship will be repulsed, that the future belongs to democracy and freedom!”

Spurred by Gorbachev, who nonetheless rejected Shevardnadze’s “panic-stricken” rhetoric, the afternoon session of the Congress voted 1,540 to 52 to have Gorbachev, the government and the nation’s legislature, the Supreme Soviet, look into the affair.

“I don’t want to say that this is it, that Shevardnadze is written off and that he goes into history--no,” Gorbachev said.

He disclosed that he was planning to propose that Shevardnadze be elected the country’s vice president, a post to be created during this month’s session of the Congress, which is also scheduled to put Gorbachev in exclusive charge of the country’s executive branch.

Despite speaking twice with Shevardnadze on the telephone, Gorbachev said, he still does not fully understand why the minister acted as he did. What “hurt the most,” Gorbachev complained, was that Shevardnadze said nothing in advance.

In theory, Shevardnadze’s resignation cannot take effect until the Soviet legislature acquiesces. “I do not accept the resignation of Shevardnadze, not in the Congress, not in the Supreme Soviet, never!” vowed Rafik N. Nishanov, chairman of the legislature’s Council of Nationalities.

News of Shevardnadze’s dramatic gesture, apparently without precedent in a system where government officials were always bound to obey party discipline, fast became the talk of Moscow. Shevardnadze’s foes, and even some admirers, said he had been too thin-skinned or cast doubt on the motives he gave for quitting.

“If everyone in the government resigned so easily, then (Prime Minister Nikolai I.) Ryzhkov should have hung himself long ago, (Russian leader Boris N.) Yeltsin should have shot himself and I can’t even imagine what death Gorbachev could choose,” said Marxist historian Roy A. Medvedev. He said Shevardnadze has shown himself too emotional to be allowed to run Soviet foreign policy any longer.

The right, meanwhile, celebrated or openly mocked their adversary. “It’s a step in the right direction; it should have been done long ago,” Alksnis of the Soyuz faction said of the resignation. But the chairman of Soyuz, Yuri V. Blokhin, accused Shevardnadze of staging a “well-planned spectacle” to sidetrack criticism of his stewardship of foreign policy.

For progressives, the prospect of Shevardnadze’s departure from public life, following that of Bakatin and Yakovlev, was shocking.

“It’s a disaster for us,” said Mikhail A. Bocharov, a Russian lawmaker. Sergei B. Stankevich, Moscow’s deputy mayor, said Gorbachev has now arrived at a fateful juncture.

“He is going too far to the right, and I think Gorbachev should make a real choice about whether he’s going to continue the reforms he made in 1985 (when he came to power) or to stop at this point,” Stankevich said.